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We’ve featured a few different book displays on Librarian Design Share since our blog began, and I have to admit they’re my secret favorite thing to post. I don’t really get the opportunity to create displays for my library, so I think posting other people’s displays is my way of filling a personal design void.

For the month of April, I put together a “Read the Rainbow” display to highlight our fiction collection. The display is an homage to the classic Pantone paint swatches. I rounded up a handful of books with vibrant covers and then used the eyedropper tool in Illustrator to select the main color featured.

I also ransacked the paint swatches at our local hardware store and covered our bulletin board. We mostly circulate DVDs and music, but our patrons are really enjoying the display and seem to be taking notice of our fiction collection.

April and I both love classic look of Pantone color swatches and can easily see this display replicated in academic, school, and public libraries. Really any library with a fiction collection would be able to do this!

If you have questions about the display, leave a comment. For the Illustrator files that accompany this display, contact Leanne directly.

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Sometimes when bad things happen, you brush them under the rug and pretend they never happened. Other times, you have to address them, embrace them, and then celebrate them. I’m so happy that our library did the latter after our leak last year. We were lucky to have the institution’s full support to repair our space. Once we did that, we decided to throw a party to recognize those who helped us and to welcome back our patrons.

When designing the invitations (above) for our celebration, our library felt that it was important to keep the theme very similar to that of the leak communications. As a group, we brainstormed ideas that would go with the droplet, and we came up with the idea of using an umbrella. It’s a protection device, and that’s what our role was during the leak–protecting both our collection and our patrons from harm. I presented the following designs to the library to vote on:

I used clipart umbrellas from Microsoft Word, filling some with colors and changing the outline colors. I combined the umbrella image with multiple clipart rain droplets that I previously used. This design was OK, but it felt like the library had endured more of a flood than just a few drops of water…so I used the curvy line drawing feature in Publisher to insert a “flood” that runs to the umbrella. Our staff overwhelmingly voted for the flood rather than the drops, and they liked the simpler umbrella best, so we had an icon for our party invitation and publicity efforts.

This design opened a floodgate of ideas (sorry for the pun, but get ready for a lot more to come!). We decided our party would include a self-guided “Flood of Information” tour, which would highlight the different spots in the library that were affected, as well as connect those spots to a fact about our services. Each station, named after songs that we thought exemplified the experience, was an exhibit: we had a tape line that showed how far the water flooded; we displayed damaged books; we had pictures and videos from the leak; and we showed a video about disaster recovery. The five stations were easily found with a map that was coordinated to blue paper droplets taped to the floor. Below is the two-sided map we distributed to our guests (and I won’t even go into the boring details of making the map, although it probably took longer than any other part of the design!).

To make our party even more personalized, after the tour, we invited guests to enjoy homemade cookies that all of us on staff had baked. It was a warm welcome back for our patrons and a real celebration of our successful recovery.

If you are interested in any of the designs above to modify for your own recovery or celebration, let me know.

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We recently moved our entire DVD collection out to the open stacks in our library. They used to be behind the circulation desk, and anyone who wanted to check out a movie had to look up a title and request it or browse through pages and pages of our DVD listings in a printed binder.

To celebrate our new browsable DVD collection, we toyed around with featuring librarian and library staff movie recommendations on the tops of the shelves and via social media. I came up with the posters below. They’re my less creative, i-can’t-use-illustrator-so-photoshop-will-suffice versions of these minimalist children’s book covers and re-imagined movie posters. I also threw in an advertisement for our library’s new Films on Demand Subscription, to go along with our movie emphasis.

I didn’t get a chance to brand the posters for our library, and ultimately, our library decided to go in a different direction with the publicity efforts. Even though these posters didn’t get used I thought they were still worth sharing in the event that someone else might use them or be inspired to great better versions!

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We librarians tend to make a lot of help sheets and signage to assist patrons as they use our resources. That’s really what Librarian Design Share is about, right? But even with best intentions, we don’t always fully think about the way our publications as a whole look and feel to our patrons.

I think Librarian Design Share would be remiss if we didn’t talk standardizing the look of your library’s publications, or branding, if you will. Brands can highlight something unique about your community (perhaps it’s near water or you’re known for an historical event), your library (maybe you have an awesome stained-glass window or a spiral staircase), or it can be based on something more abstract, like colors, shapes, or even text. We based our library branding on the pretty rainbow of colors our bound journals make on the shelves. Everyone has bound journals on their shelves, but there’s something about the color arrangement and the mass amount of them that make the way they look in our large, light-filled space memorable. Here’s our general publication header that can be copied to any document:

Whatever standardization you decide upon should happen across the board–from all the pieces of paper that a patron might see in your library to your web presence. This is our website’s look:

I thought my library was well on the way to doing this, but a quick audit of our documents online and on our slat wall exposed at least three previous brands that are still in use on our handouts.

Yikes, you know what my new project is…

Think about it terms of your favorite store: their shopping bags have the same look as their store signage as their website, right? So should our libraries. It’s about making things more consistent in the minds of our users. More simply, it’s about showing our users that we care enough to keep things updated, neat, professional, and easy for them to digest.

If you have great examples of a branding campaign you’ve created and implemented at your library, we’d love to see them! Consider submitting them to our site and sharing them with your colleagues.

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This is the last post in our series on Hjørring Public Library in Denmark. It’s a little late (sorry, Martin!), but trust me, we saved the best for last. Here’s Martin Jørgensen, Digital Librarian, to tell you about a truly amazing library display:

Here in Scandinavia Nordic crime fiction (Nordic noir) is all the rage, and a lot of our patrons check out crime fiction. Only trouble is that there is a good deal of different crime series to keep track of, so at first we made a simple catalogue, listing the order in which the novels and series should be read. We wanted to make a cover and visual line that related to the genre of crime fiction, suspense, gore and even killing. That theme quickly developed to different ways to kill off books.

Books were sawed in half with a chain saw.

Books were shot! A coworker is also a hunter, so he took a pile of discarded books, shot them and smeared red paint all over. (By the way, guns are strictly prohibited in all forms in Denmark except from hunters.)

Discarded books were made into bookguns with the help of power tools. Photos of all killed off books were taken for the cover of our crime fiction catalog and the shot, sawed, and cut out books were put on display in the library.

For our most recent version we decided to drown the books mafioso-style with chains. With the help of the local Nordsøen Oceanarium we got permission to drown books in one of their huge aquariums, and photograph and film the process, which now can be seen online (the title “Mord i serier – Seriemord” roughly translates into “Murders in series – Serial murders”).

So now our Sleeps With the Fishes project is a package consists of a new cover and updated catalogue, a commercial movie, display pieces (aka. the drowned but now dry books), posters, slides for infoscreens, and roll-ups.

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Full disclosure: I think Mary Chance is a display genius. I had the pleasure of working with her and creating displays with her years back at a high school library, and she taught me everything I know about Microsoft Publisher and crafting with paper!

Mary has since moved on to be the solo librarian at Alvin Junior High in Alvin, TX. She told me that she no longer has time to develop and design all that she wants to in her library, so she is training students to help her. Mary says the students come up with the design, and she just makes it possible for them to execute it. Her only rule with the revolving display is that the existing one cannot be taken down until there is a replacement.

The library hosts many book clubs each year, and often well-known authors make an appearance (Eoin Colfer is scheduled for next month). The students design a mobile poster to promote the book club, and Mary rolls it through the school during lunch periods to attract interest and talk to students about the featured book.

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Part 2 of our 3 part series on displays at Hjørring Public Library continues with a great example of designing an entire library’s worth of displays around a single theme. Again, here’s Digital Librarian Martin Jørgensen on his library’s display philosophy:

When it comes to displays we try to make a theme going through the entire library. Right now the theme is “5” because, the library was opened 5 years ago. The “5” displays are a broad range of subjects: 5 things to do in the garden, 5 philosophers, my 5 favorite comic books and so on. Other themes have been more abstract, like “Brown” which had displays about East Germany and a huge collection of gravy boats (brown gravy is pretty much a Danish national dish).

Martin has shared some images from the library’s theme “Meals,” which included “ (among other things) beautiful set tables (made by a store nearby), herbs growing on the shelves and a model made by me [Martin] of an American diner.

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Every once in a while you come across a library so truly amazing that you can picture yourself living in it. For me, that place is the Hjørring Public Library in Denmark. After you take a visual tour of this library, you won’t want live anywhere else.

Digital Librarian Martin Jørgensen is proud of his library, and for good reason! He’s shared an amazing array of display and design inspiration for libraries. So many, in fact, that it would be impossible squeeze them all into one post. Instead we’ll be featuring a different display from the Hjørring Public Library throughout the week.

Today’s focus: The “Bookstore Wall.” From Martin:

The largest display option we have is our “bookstore wall,” a wall covered with shelves. At first we mostly had large books on it, but now we use it more deliberately.

The best example is a rainbow I made one afternoon displaying all of the books on the wall by color. It was quite the looker.

Oh, and we’ve played wordfeud on it too!

[We also created] a banner to promote a national library film streaming service “filmstriben”. The banner consisted of press photos from the films available, and had a blank, white space where we showed movietrailers via a projector.